May 21
At least I had an excuse for being lazy this morning, cause I was up late last night. Plus, Aric was probably sad that I'd fallen right asleep. So I snuggled up against his chest until he woke up, and then I teased him with my wing a little bit more than I should have. After he recovered we tried again.
He didn't have any eggs left, but he still had another bottle of pancake batter and more hash browns. Plus there was oatmeal in the cupboard, and that made for a pretty good breakfast.
While we were eating, he asked me what my plans for the day were, and I said that I was going to go on a nice long flight to start the day, then I had to start on my essay. Plus I still had to write letters back to my sister and Comcast and Discover.
He said that he didn't have anything he had to do, but he'd be smart to start work on his theatre final.
Then I asked him what he was going to do for the summer.
He said that he'd been meaning to tell me; he had gotten a grant to work over the summer at a theater in Lafayette. Then he said that if he'd known I was going to be here that he wouldn't have, but he got the offer last November and he really shouldn't back down now.
I got a little mad that he hadn't told me sooner, especially if he'd known since November, then he got defensive and said that I hadn't bothered to tell him what I was doing for the summer, either, so the lack of communication went both ways.
He was right, of course. But I wasn't thinking straight—I was afraid of spending the whole summer without most of my friends. So I told him that was just 'cause I didn't know, but if I had known I would have told him right away.
Aric went around the table and put his hand on my shoulder and told me that it was okay; Lafayette wasn't all that far and maybe he could come up on weekends or something. But it was a theatre internship, and they were kind of hard to get, and it was close by.
I told him that I was sorry for yelling at him and that it was just unexpected, but after that I didn't want to leave at all, 'cause I knew it wouldn't be too long before he was gone.
So we changed our plans—instead of studying like we ought to, we'd go to the Air Zoo and look at the airplanes there, and he could take a picture of me standing next to one so that I could send it to my sister. And then he said we'd go out into the woods for a late picnic lunch, and just spend all day relaxing.
I said that I ought to fly out to the picnic spot and at least get some exercise today, so that's what we decided to do.
When we got in Winston, I thought about using my airplane radio to talk to Dori and see if she wanted to meet us at the Air Zoo, but I'm not supposed to use my radio for stuff like that, so I didn't.
The Air Zoo is right next to the airport, and there are a couple of airplanes sitting outside. I posed for a picture next to the white one, because it looked faster. Aric told me that it was a passenger jet, while the other one was a fighter jet, but I still thought it looked like the fastest one.
The woman selling tickets was really surprised to see me, and she came around from the desk and used her telephone to take a selfie with me, and then said that I could get in free because I was basically an aircraft. But she still made Aric pay for a ticket.
It was pretty overwhelming in there; the whole place was stuffed full of airplanes and helicopters, and each one had a little display telling us all about it. Plus some of the people who were touring the museum also knew about some of the airplanes that were in there, too, and they were happy to tell us about them, too.
We wound up spending most of the day there, and he took my picture in front of a couple of different airplanes: the Grumman G-73 Mallard, which I liked because it was an airplane that could land on water, and the Douglas C-47 because it was big, and the Lockheed SR-71 which was the fastest airplane in the whole world. Aric said that it could fly faster than the sun, which meant that they could take off at sunset and fly west, and they'd see the sun rise the wrong way and then set behind them.
And we talked to an older man named Tony whose father had flown the Waco CG-4 in the second World War. That was a special airplane, too, because it was a glider, so it had to be towed like a barge behind another airplane, and when they got near their landing site they had to release the tow-rope and there weren't any second chances. You were gonna land, and you'd better hope that if it wasn't on the runway, it was somewhere soft.
He said that in Burma, the gliders brought in equipment and the C-47s brought in men, and it was done before the Japanese even knew that the Americans were there. Then he asked if he could see me fly before we left.
We weren't ready to leave yet, so he gave Aric his telephone number, and we both went our separate ways, and looked at more of the displays. There was a little section about female pilots and astronauts, and there were biographies of the most famous ones, like Amelia Earhart, and Sally Ride who was the first American woman in space.
There was also a little flight simulator that Aric insisted that I try. When we got there, though, I didn't like it right away because it closed all around you like a clam, and I thought it would be scary inside. Anyway, you had to be four feet tall to use it, and I wasn't.
He said if I stood on my hind hooves I probably was.
I stuck my tongue out at him and told him if he wanted to try the box, he could, so he got inside and the lid closed on him and the whole thing sort of shook around for a little bit and then he got out and said that it was a lot of fun.
We spent a little bit of time in the museum store. There were some postcards that I bought, and a book about female pilots which looked interesting. And we also bought a bag of astronaut ice cream. Aric wanted to know how I knew about it, so I told him about how we'd had it at the museum in Seattle.
It probably wasn't the best thing to eat on an empty stomach, but we did anyway. Then Aric called Tony and said that we were getting ready to leave, and we waited around the entrance for him to show up.
I probably wasn't supposed to fly this close to the airport, but I knew that if I stayed below the light poles in the parking lot it would be okay, so I flew a couple laps around the parking lot and then glided around the final time. I don't think his father would have been impressed; if it wasn't for the hot air coming up off the parking lot, I wouldn't have made it at all. But he was impressed, and said that I was the most wonderful thing he'd seen all day.
I was pretty hungry when we left, so we stopped at Taco Bell for a snack, and then Aric said that if I still wanted to have a picnic, we could. I wanted to, so he said that if I wanted to get my flying in, too, we could meet in the little clearing where we'd been in the rain. He showed it to me on the map, in case I didn't remember how to get there, and reminded me that with all the tree cover it would be hard to see.
I told him that if he put a big P for pegasus on Winston it would be a lot easier to find.
He said that I could call him on his pocket telephone if I got lost, and I could just land at any crossroads and read the sign and he'd know where I was. Then he helped me into my flight gear and we kissed and then I got permission to fly, and I took off.
It really wasn't that hard to find. The roads were pretty regular, and so even when they were covered by trees, it was pretty obvious where they were. I hadn't seen it marked on the map, but the clearing was really close to the field with all the irrigation ditches that I'd seen on the Kal Haven trail.
I didn't find the right clearing right away, though. There were a couple of them, and I passed two that didn't have Winston before I found the third. And it made me laugh; Aric had painted a bit white P in the back of Winston, and it was still wet, which I found out when I landed on it.
He was still in the truck, so I tapped at the back window and he slid it open and I kissed him, then touched a bit of wet paint to his forehead.
Aric had the tailgate lowered, and we sat there and ate sandwiches and each drank a beer and then just sat together and talked until it started to get dark, then we decided to do a little bit of driving.
That little bit turned into a lot. I lost track of where we were before too long, because he was taking all back roads, and some of them were pretty twisty. Most of the time I couldn't see the moon because it was behind trees, but I managed to get myself somewhat re-oriented when he went by the railroad tracks, because I'd been there before.
We followed them all the way to Battle Creek, and then he drove down a road that overlooked the airport, and it was really pretty with all the lights marking the runways and taxiways. The different colors tell the pilots where they need to go and where they shouldn't go.
While we were sitting there, he pointed off in the distance and I saw a set of airplane spotlights, and pretty soon it came over us and landed.
On our way back home, we had to wait for a train that was going towards Kalamazoo, and once it had gone all the way by, Aric sped up until he was even with the locomotives, and then kept pace with it all the way back to Kalamazoo. We fell behind a couple of times, when we had to go through towns where we had to slow down and it didn't, and he had to get ahead so he could cross the tracks in Galesburg. We cut it pretty close; the warning lights started flashing right as we bounced across the rails.
When we got to Comstock, we had to give up the chase, because there was another crossing coming up but the road had a slow speed limit, and Aric said he didn't feel like getting a speeding ticket by running through town at sixty. I didn't mind; it had been fun and it was okay that it was over now.
He brought me back to his house and we sat on the couch and watched the end of a movie called The City of Lost Children with David and Angela. It was in French, but there were English words on the bottom so that we would know what the people were saying.
It was very strange. The town was a nightmare of a seaside town, and I was really confused about what was going on. He said it would make a lot more sense if I saw it from the very beginning, and I thought he was probably right.
Still, there was some stuff that was pretty familiar, like the big wooden wharfs and the diving suit that 'the Original' wore.
We had a couple of beers and just snuggled on the couch (that's what David and Angela were doing, too), and when it was over Aric told them how much fun we'd had at the Air Zoo, and showed them the pictures he'd taken of me.
Then we went upstairs and went to bed. It was a nice night outside, so Aric opened both of his windows and we had a little bit of a breeze.